O'Connor's rise and fall

Former San Diego mayor Maureen O'Connor appeared in federal court Thursday to plead not guilty on a money laundering charge. She is accused of embezzling money from non-profit organizations to fuel a gambling habit. She was accompanied by her attorney Eugene Iredale.
— Peggy Peattie

Former San Diego mayor Maureen O'Connor appeared in federal court Thursday to plead not guilty on a money laundering charge. She is accused of embezzling money from non-profit organizations to fuel a gambling habit. She was accompanied by her attorney Eugene Iredale.
— Peggy Peattie

San Diego  Just before 10 a.m. Thursday, Maureen O’Connor made her way slowly, uncertainly into a small courtroom on the ground floor of the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego for what was going to be one of the more humiliating moments in her life.

The courtroom was just a few blocks from San Diego City Hall and the 11th floor office that O’Connor occupied for 6½ years as the city’s first female mayor.

But the decline in O’Connor’s life between those heady days as mayor and her appearance as a defendant in a federal criminal case last week was far greater than the distance between the courthouse and City Hall.

Once vigorous and athletic, the products of a youth spent as an accomplished swimmer, the 66-year-old now uses a cane and tires easily.

Once articulate with a knack for math, she now has trouble at times following conversations, reading, even speaking, the remnants of a stroke following brain surgery.

And once wealthy, the beneficiary of a fortune estimated at $50 million left by her businessman husband, Robert O. Peterson, O’Connor is now virtually broke, the result of a stunning gambling addiction.

Her financial collapse is largely the product of years of gambling at casinos in San Diego, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. O’Connor — whose only known vice in her City Hall days was a penchant for Diet Pepsi — wagered more than $1 billion cumulatively over a nine-year span, most of it run up by spending hours at video poker machines.

Her net loss from the gambling came to an astonishing $13 million, her lawyer said. Those mounting losses led in 2008 and 2009 to her taking $2 million from the charitable foundation established by her late husband, co-founder of the Jack In The Box restaurant chain, and using it to pay casino debts and continue gambling.

She has pleaded not guilty, but her case is on hold for two years in an agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

During that time, she will have to try to pay back the money, or as much as she can. She said last week she intends to do so and always did. She’ll also have to undergo counseling for gambling addiction.

The revelations shocked those who worked with O’Connor in her public life.

“It reminds me of a Shakespearean tragedy,” said Sal Giametta, chief of staff to county Supervisor Ron Roberts.

“You have this incredible rise, the prominence she had, and now to see something like this take place, it’s very disturbing,” said Giametta, who got his start in government as an O’Connor staffer.

Dad was a bookie

O’Connor was the eighth of 13 children in a Mission Hills Irish-Catholic family, headed by her boxer-turned-bookie father.

Her interest in politics was ignited after seeing what she thought was the poor treatment of Mexican Indians working San Diego’s bicentennial celebration. Her complaints to the powers that be were ignored.

So O’Connor launched a grass-roots campaign for City Council, with her twin sister, Mavourneen, checking out a book from the library on how to run a campaign.